Where Dead Things Go to Live

Ayaan Sawant, India

“Where dead things go to live”, she recited, her voice solemn, even to her own ears. 

“And things that never lived to begin with…”, her sister finished, in a little voice. “Memory is a funny thing.”

“Memory?” 

“What else would you call it?” 

“Memory is only a part of it. How do you remember something that has never happened?” 

Her sister scratched her head. “I suppose…well…” She shrugged. “I don’t have the words.” 

“Try”, she urged. “Papa says we must get better at using our words.”

The little girl hesitated. “Um…well…you know how papa says we must get better at using our words? Well, what if he never said that? What if you only wished he said it, and so you imagine him saying it, just to see how it sound, and then, after a while, you think back on it?” She giggled. “You’re remembering something that never happened.” 

She chuckled at the little girl’s wisdom. She was right, or at least she wasn’t wrong. “Well,” she shot back, in the spirit of the game, “what if papa wasn’t real? And you carefully crafted him into the likeness of what you believed papa ought to be — but then you forget that you did that over time, and suddenly remember him when you have children of your own?” She mussed her sister’s hair, and received a cheerful giggle.

“Then I’d remember something that never lived!” the younger declared. 

The girls laughed and laughed, until the older of the two said, “But see? That isn’t just memory. It’s still only a part.”

“Where dead things go to live…” quoted the younger. “La’Hi? What do you think it is, if not memory?” 

La’Hi thought a moment. “Memory is what comes after. You can’t remember something that is yet to happen, but…Mother says when you wish for something to happen, it has happened all the same, even if it doesn’t. Sometimes I dream of a woman singing lullabies, and when I open my eyes I see mama. When I told Mother, she told me mama sings me lullabies, even if she didn’t.”

The younger girl looked confused. “But mama never sang. She hated singing, papa says.”

“In my dreams she sings to us, and she sings to us fondly, Lo. But I always wake up and forget the tune. It’s always different. It’s always beautiful.”

Lo crossed her arms, frowning. “So she did sing?”
“No.”

“So she didn’t sing?”

“No.”

“Choose one”, urged Lo.

“Why not both?”

“It can’t be both.”

“Lo,” she sighed, “you said it yourself. ‘And things that never lived to begin with…’; meaning desire, or dream, or fancy.”

The little girl’s eyes went wide. “Dreams, then?”

“Desire more than dream, I suppose. We remember things as we desire them to have been, and we dream things as we desire them to be. That’s all we are, Mother says. Our desires. Dreams and memory arise from desire.”

“Sometimes I remember things I don’t want to remember, and sometimes I have bad dreams…” the younger confided.

“And don’t you wish you could remember those things differently, or dream sweeter dreams?” she asked. 

“I do”, nodded the younger. 

“Desire can arise from dream and memory, too. But desire leads back to dream and memory,” said La’Hi, “and that’s why mama sings to me.”

The little one rubbed her chin, as if in thought. “I see”, she said, just like their father was wont to say it. 

“You see”, agreed La’Hi, though she was sure she didn’t. 

“And that goes here?” she asked, pointing a tiny finger at the white tendrils that hung over them, swaying from silver branches in the sunset breeze. “When we die?”

The grey-bodied tree creaked in the wind, tall and leafless, as white grasses rippled beneath their feet, smelling of childhood. “I think that’s what remains.” La’Hi breathed in her mother’s singing and her father’s tiny quarters and her father too. She breathed in her pillow and her sister’s favourite flowers and the flowers that that boy had never given her once upon a lifetime ago…from a little lifetime where he had…a little lifetime she so wanted to have had been, but never was… “And what remains goes here.”

They stood there for a time, silent and watching, as the hill took on a deep shade of orange in the waning scarlet of last light. The tendrils danced in the winds of dusk, ghost-pale yet auburn now, cloaked in the colour of evenfall. And the wind was singing. She closed her eyes, her hair drumming lightly against her face, listening. It was a tune she didn’t know. It sang of days as yet to come, and days come and gone, and perhaps days that would never come; it sang of longing. When she opened her eyes, she almost expected to see… “Mama.”

A spell broke, and her sister stirred. “Can we go home now?” pleaded Lo. “I really want to tell papa what I think his poem means.”

“Where dead things go to live…” she quoted. “Come”, she said, offering her hand, “it’s a long way down, and papa said to be home before dark.”

“Oh, won’t you come too?” her sister pleaded. “If only just for supper?”

La’Hi shook her head, and smiled apologetically. “I would, my sweet, but there is to be a passing come nightfall. A sickly little boy, frail and failing, no older than you. I will be needed here, to help Mother ease him into his passing.”

Lo slunk back, sullen. “Oh.” She hesitated a moment, then asked, “Do you want to return, come the morrow? To…to meet mama?”

La’Hi regarded her sister reproachfully. “We do not use the dead as a guise for our own ends, love. You know this. Little as you are, you are growing more everyday, and soon you will be called upon to learn under Mother, to acquaint yourself with the ways of passing.” She smiled, to take the sting from the reproach. “Come the morrow, we may meet at home, and sup together with papa.”

The little girl gazed at the ground, abashed. But when she heard about supper, her face lit up ever so slightly. She nodded her assent. “Forgiveness”, asked little Lo, of the silver tree. 

It amused her to see her sister so solemn. “There wasn’t any need to say that, they cannot hear you”, she informed the girl, smiling. “Even so, it is good to speak to them…”

The sun had now vanished behind the many hills in the distance, twins to the one they stood atop, their summits crowned by one solitary, leafless tree, tendrils etched black against a purpling horizon. On some, she spied tiny shapes huddled about, either come to visit their dead or in preparation of a passing. The rest were like their own, silent and bare. 

“Will he go here, then?” asked Lo. “The boy who is to die?”

“In a sense, yes”, replied La’Hi. “What remains goes here. Desire is what we call it, whatever it is. On the other hills, they have other names for it. The Mothers on hill Rianni call it an ‘impression’, and say it is what we leave behind to show for ourselves. They believe that by virtue of occupying space, we leave behind an impression. And that by virtue of being, we occupy space. When they teach the younger girls of their hill, the Mothers say that if they were to lay on grass for long enough, the blades would flatten out under them. If a visitor were to arrive a short while after, he would notice those flattened blades of grass and surmise a presence, before his own. It is that presence that they refer to as an ‘impression’. But what is it, really, that remains of us when we die? And do our lives remain as well, by virtue of having once been? On hill Kilm, they say impressions of our lives do remain, yes, along with our impressions, that are doomed to relive them for eternity. But the Mothers on Kilm have always been too cynical. Here, on hill Elm’irri, we ask, ‘what about those things that have been, but never were…What about our desires?’ If it is our lives that have been, then surely it must be our desires that remain. The impression on the grass isn’t an impression of the girl that walked away, but of the girl lying down. The same girl lay on the grass and walked away, and yet, one girl left while the other remained. We believe our desires are the impressions we leave behind to show for our lives. And if impressions are what remain of us, then desires are what remain of our lives, to our impressions. Desire only dreams and remembers, and it being the only thing that remains to our impressions, gives us reason to believe that so do they. We believe they live all those lives we never lived, love all those we never loved, are loved by those we loved that never did love us back, and still laugh, to this day, with those that loved us back but had to leave”, she said, gazing sadly at the silver tree. “We believe they go down all those roads not taken, climb all those hills not climbed, to huddle around all those trees that never flowered because after all has been, all that remains to them are the lives that have been, but never were…and because the girl who walked away is also the girl that remains, it only follows that they are us. Desire is the girl who walked away, that remains on the hill, laying there endlessly, dreaming sweeter dreams and remembering things differently. And we believe that’s what goes here.” Later, she would remember Lo saying, “I see.” But then, La’Hi only sighed and said, “Maybe for mama, she always did sing to us…and maybe now she does, Lo…or…maybe she doesn’t…maybe…maybe there was a boy, once, that never gave her flowers…”

“Flowers?” Lo piped up, confused. “What boy?”

But La’Hi forged on, never answering. “…maybe for papa, mama will never have died…maybe…”
“Is that what it means?” Lo asked, a little louder. 

La’Hi stopped. “What, my sweet?”

“Is that what it means?” Lo repeated. “Papa’s poem? I mean, what you just said about papa? That for him, mama will never have died?”

La’Hi considered it a moment. “Where dead things go to live…”, she quoted, thoughtfully. She smiled. “Well, why don’t we ask him ourselves,” she said, “tomorrow, during supper?”

Lo nodded, smiling, and turned towards the tree. “I wish mama could hear us”, said Lo, gazing wistfully at the tendrils. “I’d read to her from papa’s poems. He writes only of her, La’Hi. It would make her happy.”

La’Hi draped an arm lightly over her sister’s shoulder, and smiled. “Mama now lives a life she has always dreamed within…just like the rest of them…just like papa will…and just like you and I will, when our time comes. She is happy.”

“Do you think she dreams of us?” Lo asked, in a little voice. 

“Why, yes, my sweet”, coddled La’Hi, gazing down lovingly at her little sister. “She sings to us, doesn’t she?”
And as she said this, a hue of blue seemed to blossom out of Lo’s bone-pale skin, blue in her hair white as grass, blue swallowed whole by the depths of her yellow-gold irises. The grasses had turned blue around them as well, she noticed, and, looking up, La’Hi realised that they were standing in a pool of light. Night had fallen so quietly, that, silent and swaying, it had taken the brightening tendrils for her to notice it. In the distance, the hills had turned into islands of light, blue and pulsing, as their trees, suspended above their summits like little solitary lamp flies, stood a luminous vigil over kneeling figures wherever they had visitors; so lonely, so beautiful. And here, as the tendrils shone and dimmed, La’Hi looked down once more at her little sister. Come the light, she saw her smiling. Come the light, she smiled back, and together, they gazed upwards…

Darkness had settled. Above, stars twinkled in their millions. And above again, in the depths of the night sky, tall and dark and frozen in an austere silence, they could see clouds looming like lone veils dissolving into pink and purple shadows.

“The clouds are out”, announced Lo.

“A clear night”, whispered La’Hi. 

“We’re late, La’Hi”, her sister giggled, “and papa will be wroth.”

The little girl had the right of it. Papa had said to be home before dark, but now the Hour of Strange Clouds was on them, it was a long way down, and papa was going to be wroth.

Ayaan is a musician from India who likes to dabble in poetry, and, very recently, short-prose fiction writing. His preferred genre of writing is science fiction.